Wilhelmshaven exists because the Jade Bight is one of the few places along the German North Sea coast deep enough, year-round, for serious warships. Prussia bought the necessary land from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg in 1853 and spent the next sixteen years carving harbour basins and locks out of saltwater meadow. King Wilhelm I inaugurated the port in 1869 - the city took its name from him - and the Kaiserliche Marinewerft, the imperial shipyard, set to work building the fleet that would carry Germany's brief overseas empire. You can still find the original 1870s entrance building of that yard, and a few blocks away the Kaiserliche Westwerft, completed in 1913 just before the world it served broke apart.

By the autumn of 1918, Germany was losing the First World War, and the High Seas Fleet had spent most of it sitting in Wilhelmshaven's harbour, blockaded by the British. On 24 October the naval command ordered the fleet out for a last suicidal sortie. The sailors refused. The refusal began on the ships moored in Schillig roadstead and spread back to Wilhelmshaven itself, where on 4 November sailors and workers raised red flags over the imperial yards. Within days the revolt had spread to Kiel, then across Germany. By 9 November Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated. The German Revolution that ended the monarchy and produced the Weimar Republic began in this harbour, with men who would not climb back into the engine rooms of doomed battleships.

The Second World War was harder on Wilhelmshaven than almost anywhere else on the North Sea coast. Allied bombing flattened much of the city - the 1869 Christus-und-Garnisonskirche was gutted in 1942, the modernist brick Rathaus, completed in 1929 by the architect Fritz Hoeger, was wrecked in 1944. Both were rebuilt in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the same shapes. The Bundesmarine - the postwar West German navy - moved into the same basins the Kaiserliche Marine had used, and Wilhelmshaven became, and remains, the largest single base of the German Navy. The Deutsches Marinemuseum on the harbour preserves part of that history aboard the former destroyer Moelders and a decommissioned U-boat. The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Bruecke, a double swing bridge built between 1905 and 1907, still pivots open for passing ships and has become the city's signature landmark.

Wilhelmshaven sits at the southern edge of the Wadden Sea, a UNESCO World Heritage tidal landscape that runs the length of the German and Dutch coasts. The city's Wadden Sea Visitor Center anchors that connection with an exhibition that includes the 14-metre skeleton of a sperm whale that beached on the island of Baltrum in 1994 - the whale weighed 39 tonnes in life, and its organs were preserved by plastination by Gunther von Hagens, the same anatomist whose Body Worlds exhibitions later toured the world. The Aquarium Wilhelmshaven sits on the Helgolandkai. The 1911 Wasserturm rises over the western suburbs. At Banter See, on the western edge of town, hundreds of pairs of common terns nest each summer on concrete platforms originally built to load torpedoes.

Wilhelmshaven nearly became Germany's deep-water container port in the 2000s with the construction of JadeWeserPort, but the trade boom that motivated the project arrived later and smaller than planned. The harder pivot came in 2022. Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would build its first LNG import terminals at high speed, and one of them would go here. The first shipment - a floating regasification tanker fed by an LNG carrier from Louisiana - arrived in December 2022. A new chapter, written in months rather than decades, began on the same coastline where Prussian engineers had spent sixteen years dredging a harbour out of marsh.

For a small city, Wilhelmshaven has produced an outsized cast. The chemist Eilhard Mitscherlich, born here in 1794, discovered crystallographic isomorphism in 1819. The mathematician Heinz Pruefer, who died in 1934 at just 38, left a string of theorems still taught in algebra courses. The rocket engineer Klaus Riedel worked on the V-2 programme at Peenemuende and was killed in 1944. The clarinetist Karl Leister, born here in 1937, anchored the Berlin Philharmonic for decades. The painter Rainer Fetting, one of the Neue Wilden of the 1980s, grew up here too. Not every native son is a source of civic pride - the convicted serial killer Niels Hoegel, who murdered at least 85 patients in his care as a nurse, was also born in Wilhelmshaven - but the city does not pretend its history is uncomplicated. Few places in Germany can.